Albion Online: Vulnerabilities in the Code

Naughty naughty… But in all honesty, I’ve done the same thing in ragnarok online in the past. Mostly because the game is such a mindless korean grind and the bots are so easy to setup.

The thing was, in that game it was kinda fun botting, if anyone has ever played Final Fantasy 12, botting on ragnarok online sorta went like that. I essentially made an army of bots and charged across the landscape with the help of Cheap Albion Online Gold, I even have some war music playing in the background as my army of 26 level 1 novices all group up to take on an orc.

In a sense, there are three things that can lead to bot creation, vulnerabilities in the code, availability of account creation, and of course the demand for automation. Essentially if it’s easy to hack, it will be hacked, since there’s always gonna be that power struggle it’s alot easier to become number 1 by cheating.

In terms of availability of account creation, since accounts for this game will be free-to-play that just immediately opens the floodgates for hack attempts. Since in retrospec if you fail and get banned, you just make another account and try again.

Finally the last part is also important, programming hacks and bots take effort, effort that someone else has to put forth. Sometimes they want compensation for their work, whether it’s through legitimate(selling the bot), or illegal (Stealing accounts and information) means. If and when the game becomes popular it will also attract hackers, and when they the demand for automation and potential gamebreaking cheats, they will see how far they can disassemble and how much they can access.

I think it’s important for the dev team behind albion online to prepare accordingly. There will be hackers and cheaters, as such there should be tool’s available to the GM’s that will maintain this game for sniffing out players attempting to use modified clients or 3rd party hacking software.

Furthermore, these tools should be made by the same team that’s creating this game, that means DO NOT RELY ON THIRD PARTY PROTECTION. Alot of really crappy korean MMO’s rely on crappy third party like hackshield and the like to protect their games, these do nothing but harm the consumer, hackers will simply figure out a workaround to bypass the third party and go straight into the source of the game and cause all sorts of problems.

I would even recommend this if it’s not already being done, the dev team should try hacking their own game. Put themselves in the seats of the hackers attempting to break in and discover vulnerabilities that might have been overlooked. Rather than relying on GM’s to ban people using widely known hacks, figure out why the hack’s are working and fix the hole in the system. This should be done sooner rather than later, as when the engine gets to a complex state, fixing these holes will become harder and harder, until eventually fixing would require a complete overhaul.

In other words, rather than curing the symptoms (Banning hack users), kill the disease (Fix the vulnerability).